2007-04-20

alpha users, dissertation, dark energy, undergrads

I spent a lot of Thursday (sorry, forgot to post) and today interacting with our new alpha testers for astrometry.net. The alpha users are certainly finding a lot of issues with the service, which is great. Internally, we are debating what new features are highest priority; different alpha users want very different things.

I also spent a lot of time working through draft chapters of Masjedi's thesis, which is a pleasure.

Jim Condon (NRAO) gave the seminar today; he showed us that he can (in principle, and probably in practice) measure the Hubble Constant to few-percent accuracy using maser galaxies. If he can, he will nail things like flatness and the nature of dark energy. This is nicely complementary to the baryon acoustic feature stuff we do here at NYU.

With Zolotov I pitched some projects to undergrads yesterday, including a project to look at galactic substructure with NYU undergraduate Kathy Zhang and to look at the formation of disk-galaxy spiral structure with NYU undergraduate Bob Ma.